• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, January 14, 2025

Amazon has made significant changes to its product title listing policy and will begin enforcing them next week.

Tuesday's deadline -- January 21 -- includes changes related mostly to character length and keyword repetition.

It aims to improve on prompting concise customer listings to standardize how pages appear.

It appears that Amazon has become much more serious about SEO and paid advertising.

“Over time, we've observed that product titles have become longer, and they sometimes include redundant working or characters that can decrease customer confidence,” Amazon wrote in a post. “These new policy changes will help to ensure that product titles are clear, concise and consistent.”

One Amazon seller expressed support for Amazon's decision, but believes sellers will become very creative and load on unique, non-repeating keywords all the way up to the 200 character maximum. 

Another seller commented that "titles have been repeatedly messed with by Amazon -- including (actually, particularly) my brand name/company name -- without notification, often in a manner that degrades the listing, and not in a way that improves compliance with title requirements. This is not going to end well, no matter what reassurances we're given."

Calling it a case of non-human-readable, word-salad titles, the seller wrote that Amazon recently announced it would depreciate brand names in listings that encourage "sales by word salad rather than reputation, and then this. Who could have ever seen that coming?"

For most product categories, Amazon said titles may not exceed 200 characters, which include spaces.

Special characters like $ or ? are not allowed unless they are part of the brand's name. Most of the characters are used to make the listings stand out.

Titles also may not contain the same word more than twice. Prepositions, articles and conjunctions are exceptions.

Keyword repetition restrictions are the most interesting. Fred McKinnon, founder of eComCatalyst, an ecommerce and Amazon agency, published a video posted to YouTube that explains Amazon's changes.  

McKinnon said that if companies do not change their titles, Amazon will start suggesting new ones through its AI technology.

All title changes are subject to the updated policy, but can be changed in the Manage All Inventory section upon review.

Override suggestions are provided for non-compliant titles to brand owners in Review Listing Updates.

This also is where Amazon will start suggesting new titles written by its AI technology.